Twitter's utility

Twitter is a messaging service, limited to 160 140 characters, accessed on mobile phones and the web, and whose raison d'etre is "What are you doing?" I began as an unbeliever, and if not now a believer, I have become a regular user.

Dan Farber of CNet has a good take on its relative usefulness.

I first learned of the recent tragic earthquake in China via Twitter messages from people I follow on the service. To be clear, Twitter is not the Holy Grail of communications services--it's an extension of instant messaging and technologies such as RSS. Nor are the 140 characters in a Twitter message a substitute for a blog post or news article. But a "tweet" can be a network amplifier, providing a brief snapshot [emphasis mine], innervated by followers and the followed, that can be broadcast around the world in near real time.

Twitter and related services are currently noisy, spammy, unwieldy, overrated and often unreliable. But over time, the core concepts will become an integral part of the Internet's communications fabric.

Here's how I use Twitter.

• It's a useful business tool. I alert customers to brewery and beer-related events in which I'm participating. And quick beer business updates.
• Succinct beer reviews, particularly at beer tastings or festivals.
• I link the Tweets —as the updates are called— to my blog, website, and FaceBook account.
• Public access to tweets can be controlled. Mine are public, but I limit their personal content.

Here's an example of an established medium using the service to report news: Covering the news with Twitter

But Twitter does not seem ready now to be a replacement tool for the mobile phone, text messaging, or Instant Messaging. There have been all too frequent crashes of the system, incidents of which have seemed to have been increasing as the service's popularity has risen. For example, Twitter is at reduced functioning today.

More about Twitter at Twitter.

No April emails

When you submit a public comment here on the blog, it usually will be posted.

But in April, any private messages sent to me via the Feedback/Guestbook Form may have been lost.

There apparently had been problems with the feedback hosting page. I apologize if I failed to respond to any emails.

The problem has been, I hope, corrected. Try again!

Spam gotcha

Those wavy wierd letters that one is required to type into many website forms to verify that one is a human? They have a name: CAPTCHA, that is, Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.

Unfortunately, the HALs of our word have recently cracked the code.

Microsoft and other Web companies say that they are interested in creating human verification tests that are harder for computers to crack. But there's an inherent difficulty.

Making the tests harder for the computer makes them harder for humans, too.

Unfortunately , because we'll be getting a lot more spam email until a newer, better spamtrap CAPTCHA can be developed.

The Turing reference in the acronym is to Alan Turing, a British mathematician, who defined a computer as thinking when it would be able to conduct a conversation as if a human, undetected as a computer.

Reason for hope

It's a reassuring analysis as to why McCain can't win:

As we slog through the seemingly unending mire of the Democratic primaries, a meme has taken hold: the longer Obama battles Clinton, the more likely it is that McCain will win the election. Nonsense. McCain is a weak candidate in a year when Republicans are running against their own party. Barring some unforeseen catastrophe, there will be a Democrat in the White House come January. Take heart, ye who have suffered under Republicans for too long: change is coming. Here's why McCain can't win.

More (from Low on the Hog).

Tread carefully, however. Democrats sometimes do find creative ways to lose a sure thing.

Witness the disgusting (not a Democrat) Antonin Scalia "Get over it" blasphemy of 2000.

The President and my mother

The former President of the United States asked, "And where did you work for me?" He asked again, "Where did you work?"

Jimmy Carter was signing copies of his new book, A Remarkable Mother, a biography of his mother 'Ms. Lillian', at a bookstore today in McLean, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C.

It was an efficient signing.

We were wanded by Secret Service agents at the door and then moved briskly along a long line. "No personal time with the President," we were told.

But my mother, Gene, would have none of it. She reached the table and began talking a blue streak to Carter, a man she considers a great humanitarian. She mentioned that she had worked for him.

Carter may have just returned from the middle East, meeting with Hamas and the Israelis, working still, into his 80s, to broker peace. But Carter had never dealt with the oratorical skills of my mother, who had spent her working years representing her country, and raising a family overseas, in the Foreign Service.

He tried a third time, "Ma'am, where did you work for me?"

I was standing there, behind her, and saw the President looking at her. I nudged Mom and whispered, "The President just asked you where you worked for him."

"At the polls," she replied.

And then, the President of the United States, paused, smiled and looked up again. He thanked my remarkable mother, Genovaite Cizauskas, and wished her, in advance, "a Happy Mother's Day."

We were moved along.

Load up the Pantry

Load Up the Pantry

Stockpiling staples like rice and pasta, etc.: that's what the Wall Street Journal, this morning, has encouraged shoppers to begin doing in the United States.

Alarmist, yes. But it's yet another real sign of the world-wide economic maelstrom. And, that is indeed frightening.

Super-voters

What's the deal with super-delegates anyway? Are they bad for the democratic process of the Democratic Party? And in the Republican primaries, one vote more than the opponent yields the winner all of the votes. Is that fair?

We've had similar super-voters in our presidential elections since the U.S. Constitution was ratified over 200 years ago. They're called Electors -- of the Electoral College.

Witness the presidential elections of 2000 and 1876, and 1800, and in fact most presidential elections: with the Electoral College system of super-voters, the principle of one man one vote does not seem to apply.

[UPDATE 2008.04.25: The Wall Street Journal published an analysis today of the changing methods that have been used to determine the number of Electors for each state.]

more customer dis-service from Microsoft

I've stated before that I don't steal music. But the big music companies treat me, and millions of other music consumers, as if we do.

It's not just the music labels who use new-speak Digital Rights Management (but are indeed relenting as they see profit in sales) but it's also the providers, such as the increasingly irrelevant RealMusic, and nearly everyone's (not me!) darling Apple, and nearly everyone's target Microsoft.

Read about this recent development.

If you ever needed more proof of why DRM is just a terrible set of technologies that do nothing but frustrate legit customers, the MSN Music store is a prime example. The doomed service was shut down over a year ago upon the launch of the Zune, forcing people to switch to a new service. That minor annoyance aside, the change was manageable because Microsoft kept alive their authorization server for the DRM-locked music files people had previously purchased. Thus, even if the customer purchased a new computer, they could unlock that music.

But that is about to change. Microsoft has announced that they will cease maintaining the key retrieval service by the end of August.

As a result, for all the music purchased on the MSN Music store it will become impossible to retrieve your keys. If the music is transferred to another device, it can never be unlocked again – at least not in a legal way – rendering that purchase a total loss to that person. For those that have libraries of music purchased through the MSN store, they will be locked in to that specific hardware for as long as they want to use those files.

Ultimately, this serves as a reminder of what DRM really is: A way for companies to control your use of their content. Rather than purchasing, you are renting.

Microsoft to cease authorizing MSN Music keys
By Justin Mann, TechSpot.com
Published: April 22, 2008, 9:08 PM EST

Clinton wins ... Pennsylvania

• Clinton drew her usual strong support among senior citizens and white women, and narrowly won the votes of white men.
• She even was competitive with Obama among whites under 30 years old, a group that has favored Obama in many states.
• Obama won the support of black voters and college graduates of all races. A quarter of Obama's supporters were black, and half had college degrees.
• Three in 10 Pennsylvania Democratic voters were union members or had one in their household, and they favored Clinton over Obama.
• White voters who said race was a factor supported Clinton over Obama by 3-to-1, while whites who said race wasn't a factor divided between Clinton and Obama more evenly.
• Those who said gender was a factor actually tended to favor Clinton, while Obama did better among those who said gender was not a factor.

And here's where it bodes very well, if there's no self-immolation of the party before the convention:

Pennsylvania Democrats had a sour view of the economy — four in 10 said the country is in a serious recession and at least as many called it a moderate recession. Only about one in 10 said the economy is not in recession. Clinton did a little better than Obama on who would improve the country's economy, but nearly half of Pennsylvania Democrats thought both candidates would make a contribution to solving the country's economic problems.

from AP analysis of exit polls

Bitter?

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Obama's speech may have contained an un-felicitous turn of phrase, but as I read it I saw no "elititism" or "racism". (Although a Clinton supporter, I may not support all that she does or says!).

As a diarist at Daily Kos states:

Obama lists things that people use to explain their frustrations, not express them. I believe that Obama is remarking upon bitter people on the left and the right. In fact, this may be something of a pro-gun, pro-religious statement, basically saying that certain embittered liberals cling to guns as a way to explain their frustrations, while some embittered conservatives cling to xenophobia, while just about everyone can irrationally blame various religions.

And Robert Reich's take.

Over the last eight years (and really beginning back in the Reagan administration), wealth and capital and economic rights have been brazenly removed from the rest of us and transferred to an elite super-minority, the theft wrapped in a quilted cloak of growth and free enterprise and national security.

And if we dare to object, we are branded whiners or, worse, un-American.

Should we be bitter? HELL YA! Should we do something about in November? HELL YA!